by Kim Sagwa
“Is that supposed to get her breathing?” says Crystal.
Chŏng’u doesn’t reply; this is serious. Crystal tries to straighten Mina’s disheveled hair. Silently, Chŏng’u continues his peculiar attempt at first aid while Crystal helplessly drinks the tonic. Finally Chŏng’u flips Mina back over and attempts CPR.
“Stop! No more!” Crystal screams, drawing a look from him. “What’s your name anyway?”
“Chŏng’u. We better call 911.”
“You’re sure she’s not breathing?”
“Yeah.”
Crystal likes it that he’s so cool and reserved.
Pyŏl comes back. “The fuck?”
Crystal and Chŏng’u don’t answer, merely regard Mina. Pyŏl comes over to Mina and calls her name. No response. Crystal punches in 911 on her cellphone. The room they’re in looks shabby in the bright light that has replaced the dim, rotating party light. Just as Crystal hits Talk on her cellphone Mina grabs her thigh. “Hey…I’m okay.”
“You are?”
“But it’s hard to breathe.”
“She’s breathing,” Crystal announces.
“Yeah?”
“Fuck, she scared the hell out of me!”
“Hey, Pyŏl, stop swearing,” Crystal barks.
“Fuck.”
“Fuck? Did you say fuck? You did say fuck again, didn’t you.”
Crystal lunges at him, starts beating him. He doesn’t resist, just accepts the kicks and punches. Chŏng’u flinches, then returns to his songbook and picks out a new tune.
“I said I’m having a hard time breathing!” Mina’s voice is lost as the song begins, and then Chŏng’u is singing—a hit with a fast tempo. Chŏng’u wails away. Crystal helps Mina sit up. Mina’s eyes are red and teary.
“Hey, Mina? You okay?”
“My head hurts.”
“Why?”
“It just does. I’m fucking depressed. I want to kill myself.”
“Why do you say that?” Crystal examines her. Mina has a pained expression, but Crystal feels numb—and frustrated by her numbness. Crystal brings her face closer to Mina’s an inch at a time. At close range she can magnify Mina’s lips, eyes, nose, and the streaks from dried tears on her cheeks. But no matter how close she gets, she can’t grasp her own emotions in these details. To disguise the void of her feelings Crystal crinkles her face theatrically.
Tears ooze out through Mina’s closed eyelids. “I wanna go home. I wanna kill myself. My head hurts super bad. I can’t breathe. Feel like I’m suffocating. It’s so… so… stupid, this place.”
“Mina, stop it.”
“What’s the matter?” Mina opens her eyes.
“You’re scaring me.”
“Really?”
Mina sees Crystal move her lips. The colored lights rotate again. Chŏng’u wails. Mina can’t hear Crystal. She can’t hear a thing. “Hey. I can’t hear you. Say it again. Tell me why—why do I scare you?”
Crystal moves her lips again. The lights briefly flicker. Before them are six television screens and on each of them the same girl wearing the same smile performs the same dance, and the same song lyrics run across the screens, a line at a time.
Mina, ashen-faced, pushes Crystal, gets up, and grabs the doorknob. It doesn’t turn. Crystal takes Mina by the arm, her lips moving. Mina can’t hear her. She tenses with fear and with a great effort tries the knob again. It won’t move. Crystal grabs both her arms and shakes her.
“Let go.” The words barely escape Mina’s lips.
Crystal is flustered—Mina never talks like that. “Mina, what are you doing? That’s the wrong way. The door’s over here.”
Mina startles and lets go of what she’s holding—the handle on a milky pink plastic vase containing an artificial petunia. Pyŏl and Chŏng’u watch Mina, baffled. Mina doesn’t understand what’s happening to her. Her only thought is that they’re all making fun of her. And then she registers their confused expressions. And she looks at the vase with the petunia and thinks she realizes what they’re up to—they got her dead drunk until she passed out, then wrapped her hand around the handle of the vase. But considering the shape she’s in—tongue not working, drunk and scared out of her mind—she’ll never get them to own up to it. All she can do is slump to the floor, bawling like a toddler. Crystal grabs a microphone and sings. It’s a slow, quiet love song. She caresses Mina’s shoulder as she sings. Mina’s crying dies down. Pyŏl goes out the door. During the intro to the next song Crystal bends down to Mina. “You okay? Aren’t you thirsty? How about a bottle of water?”
Mina shakes her head.
Pyŏl comes back with a Baskin-Robbins ice cream cone and hands it to Mina. With a piercing stare at the cone Mina says, “Of all the thirty-one flavors this is the one I like the least.” Crystal and Chŏng’u glare at Pyŏl—nice try! Mina tries to get up but slumps back to the floor, the impact causing her to drop the cone. She bursts into tears. The others look frightened. In no time the ice cream melts. Chŏng’u pops open the last can of beer. Crystal and Pyŏl light cigarettes for each other. Mina’s crying grows louder. Crystal presses a random button on the song selector and hits Start. Out comes a popular song from the 1970s about a couple lying in the grass. Chŏng’u giggles at the lyrics that pass across the screens and manages to spill his beer. Mina vomits on the floor.
The four of them climb the narrow stairs from the basement karaoke place. Outside it’s dark and a mishmash of pop songs fight for attention like yowling cats. With Mina in tow Crystal is about to blend into the crowd on the busy street when Pyŏl grabs her shoulder. “Bye.” She gives him a cute grin. “Take care.” She watches Pyŏl and Chŏng’u—lingering where they parted—grow small as she and Mina walk away. The two boys have their arms around each other’s shoulders and are smiling idiotic smiles. Crystal gives Pyŏl a loving look as he recedes into the distance. Still wearing that warm expression, she turns to Mina without really thinking about it and the next moment the world turns black. She realizes she’s all alone with Mina. Mina’s arm on her shoulder oozes cold sweat. Crystal’s smile disappears. They turn down a street lit only by yellow sodium lights, altogether different from the busy street. Crystal lets out a faint sigh. Mina lights a cigarette and draws the attention of a middle-aged man fanning himself in front of a grocery store; he looks like he wants to brain her with a brick. Crystal leads Mina. Mina gapes up at the dark sky crisscrossed by a mesh of power lines.
“Chiye’s gone,” Mina says. After a long pause she continues, as if ashamed of herself, “What do I do now?” She sounds stiff and awkward, as if reading from a book.
Tense, Crystal watches her. She doesn’t like it when Mina looks pained like this; she hates it. She doesn’t want to talk, not about something so grim, no matter whom she’s with. She wonders, of course, what exactly Mina feels. But if Mina is about to tell her how she feels…now that’s scary, Crystal doesn’t like that. Damn the contradictions she feels! Her rationality demands that she block the flow of her emotions toward Mina. It’s easier said than done. Crystal is unable to refuse the demands of those emotions, they’re so massive, so powerful, so forceful yet dark. Is it love she feels, or jealousy? Whatever it is, it’s new, complex, and frightening, and it leaves her feeling as stiff as a log—who needs all that? She’s afraid. She feels inky water lapping at her ankles and she’s afraid of what lies beneath. Gingerly she lifts a foot from the black, lukewarm liquid, and at that moment her eyes meet Mina’s. And in those eyes she reads: How could you? How could she what? What huge mistake involving Mina is she guilty of? Nothing comes to mind. Then why does Mina have that look in her eyes? Crystal is troubled. She feels she’s been dropped into a city where everyone speaks a different language. Familiar things no longer feel familiar. She wants to escape this ambiguity that so upsets her, that’s so unusual to her. She has to find a place with clarity. She pulls her other foot out of the murky water and says: “Mina, I’m sleepy. I want to go home.”
Mina’s
face blanches. She’s barely able to collect herself. Crystal doesn’t notice. Mina nods and tosses her cigarette into the street. Their eyes meet but their lips don’t move. Mina crumples her empty cigarette pack and tosses it as far as she can. And then they are moving in different directions, without saying goodbye. Only the moon is left and it too is filtered by the clouds.
MINA
The classroom is a cacophony of hellos, high fives, screams, bursts of laughter, curses, chairs tumbling, the door opening and quickly slamming shut. The class monitor’s announcement of a birthday party for the homeroom teacher generates even more of a buzz.
The bell for the start of class rings and the students stifle all noise, waiting for the arrival of their teacher. The door opens, firecrackers go off, and the students shoot up and launch into “Happy Birthday”—or is it “Benevolent Teacher” that’s supposed to come first? The confusion makes for an awkward dissonance, and when the teacher bursts into delighted laughter mayhem reigns. With her eyes shut, Crystal daydreams that there’s a huge cheesecake waiting for her in the refrigerator at home—or maybe that Mina will bring one when she comes over. She hears chairs scraping against the floor. She opens her eyes to see most of her classmates back in their seats with beaming smiles as they feast on cookies, fruit, and soft drinks, their teacher gathering her gifts in a shopping bag, the monitor cutting the cake. Crystal remains sitting. A grinning boy is coming in her direction, a dud firecracker in his hand. She looks down, staring at her textbook. He passes her on the way to his locker. Glancing at Mina’s unoccupied seat, Crystal reaches into her pocket for her cellphone. Mina’s been absent for two days: either her phone’s off or she’s just not returning calls. Crystal tries Mina’s number, hangs up when there’s no answer, then tries her number in vain one more time.
“Mina’s absent again,” she says aloud, and everyone turns to face her. The impression she gives is that without Mina something is missing. Staring blankly out the window and scratching her thigh, she gets up and heads for the door. Along the way she loses her balance for a moment and lists to the side and in the next moment she bumps her head against the wall. Shaken by the stares of her classmates, she staggers to the door and out into the hallway. The sky wears its perpetual film of yellow dust but the air is weighted with moisture—a heavy rain is on the way. Groups of students in blue tracksuits pass her in the hallway trailing a sweaty odor. She bumps into them as she wanders aimlessly from one end of the hall to the other.
“Hey, are you okay? You look tired.”
She feels a tug on her arm, startles, and looks up to see Chiwŏn’s face, perpetually pale and weary, right in front of her. She looks concerned.
“I guess I had too much to drink last night.”
“How did you do on the midterms?”
“Get lost, Chiwŏn!” Making her off-balance way back to the classroom, she sits, puts her headphones back on, and replays the song she was listening to on her MP3 player, “How to Disappear Completely” by Radiohead. And she thinks about Mina who has disappeared.
For no particular reason Mina often cuts off contact with everybody and misses school. Which means she’s never earned a perfect attendance award—but she couldn’t care less. Nor do her parents consider attendance all that important as long as she goes to school often enough, studies hard enough, gets good enough grades, and is thought well enough of by her peers and teachers. She does enough to avoid requiring much in the way of parental attention. She’s never crossed a bridge from which she couldn’t return, and her personality hasn’t been warped by despair. She is growing up with a good education and the well-balanced sensibility characteristic of the children of parents who grew up with a good education; she has lived her life free and easy and has never crossed the line. Crystal envies this girl more than she would like to admit, Mina who Crystal thinks possesses a free spirit that’s inconsistent with society in these times. How can she do that? Sometimes Crystal is tormented by this question. Compared with Mina’s liberated, beautiful, and adequately abundant life, Crystal feels her own is insubstantial and unhealthy, like mass-produced doughnuts dripping with trans fats. Mina is relaxed and fearless and, as far as Crystal can tell, she’s never been hurt. How is it possible?
Mina has several peculiar pastimes, one of which is that she periodically goes into a closet and doesn’t come out till her MP3 player’s battery dies. It’s so comfortable in there, she’d say. Really? To test Mina’s thesis Crystal tried it herself, with her own MP3 player. She found Mina’s closet boring, dark, and dead. The stillness was frightening, and it was too dark to see anything. The music was too loud and sharp. In the close, suffocating darkness she could feel the visceral ugliness of the human body. Her legs and arms, unable to stretch out, were useless appendages of skin and bone. She went on the prowl but felt nothing except for last winter’s clothing, smelled nothing but the heavy scent of lavender air freshener. She exited the closet hating Mina and disappointed in herself.
Another of Mina’s proclivities, a rather extravagant one, is to lie about having lost her MP3 player. That way she could buy a new one to add to her diverse collection. As soon as she hears a new player is on the market, she loses her current one. By now her “lost” MP3 players have filled a wooden box in a back corner of the closet—five iPods, two each of iRivers and Samsungs, a Sharp, and a Sony. The two Samsungs are the same model and color, one of which she deluded herself into actually thinking she really lost. She can’t explain how this particular interest developed.
“When I reach a hundred I’ll show my mom,” Mina tells Crystal when she’s drunk. “For revenge.”
“Revenge for what?”
But Mina doesn’t answer.
When Minho learned about Mina’s luxurious pastime he snatched her new sixty-four gigabyte iPod and hit her with it. Mina pulled down the collar of her blouse so Crystal could see the small but deep gash a corner of the iPod made in her neck. “And here…” she showed Crystal dark purple swelling and a scab on her left shoulder. Crystal tried in vain to imagine dependable, well-mannered Minho attacking Mina with an iPod.
“What did your mom say?”
“She doesn’t know.”
“Why not?”
“Well, I told the idiot I’d kill myself if he ever squeals on me.”
“And he believes you.”
“Of course.”
“How can you be sure?”
“I went on a hunger strike.”
Her three-day hunger strike brought a formal apology from Minho and a new iPod from her mother once Mina showed her the broken one. Since then Minho hasn’t interfered with Mina’s desires.
When people talk about a rich kid with a good education, they often testify to her innocence—she’s not aware of how privileged she is; you won’t find her bragging or showing off; she’s even humble! This kind of assessment brings to mind a poor kid who is so perfectly naïve that she doesn’t even realize how poor she is. The clear difference between the two is: if the poor kid’s ignorance of her poverty is a sin only to herself, the rich kid’s ignorance of her affluence is a sin against others. Take an innocent kid who crushes an earthworm with her foot for fun. Clearly that’s bad. But her parents don’t dwell on it. Instead they encourage their kid, they praise her, and if you were to challenge them they’d say, Well, what do you expect, she’s only a kid, she’s got a lot to learn. To maintain their control, parents inevitably downplay their own sins; they tell their kids the world has only two kinds of people: those who do things and those who get things done to them, there’s no one in between. The life we were never allowed is the life you’ll have, there’s no other option. It’s a fair fight, the parents insist, the results are transparent. So swallow your pride, accept defeat, and do things our way from now on. The problem is, the concept of a fair fight is a perversion of reality. The world keeps slowly turning with one part of the city maintaining a closed and exclusive middle-class lifestyle that is selfish, ignorant, and irresponsible, all of its p
ractitioners keeping quiet about how that lifestyle came to be and how it manages to repeat itself—how sinful it is—while in another section of the city the lives of the losers slowly sink beneath all the pressures and sins of the winners, though no one calls for accountability. Where is it going, this world—to what end? No one knows. It’s an unnavigable marsh, and it’s on this footing of ignorance and sin that Mina’s virtues have accumulated. But is anyone about to corner her for her sins, blame her for her ignorance? Such a possibility has long since gone extinct in P City. To the world at large Mina’s father is a translator and fiction writer. But he hasn’t translated a book in six months, and his creative writing career consists of one story collection published five years ago by a prestigious press; it earned a single review in an influential daily’s weekend edition, struggled to sell out its first press run, then disappeared from readers’ memories. How then does Mina’s family get along? Until Mina’s father won the lottery they depended entirely on her mother’s earnings. Their lifestyle was typical of an educated family that had placed their future on the mother’s shoulders. But this was before Crystal met Mina, three years ago, when Mina and her family moved to their current apartment near Crystal’s when Mina’s father won the lottery. The cost of their new luxury apartment was almost as much as the jackpot from the lottery, but they paid only half in cash and the rest with a loan. They celebrated with a ski trip to the Czech Republic. Upon returning they filled their new home with fancy furniture and appliances. The quarterly assessments show the apartment appreciating in value slowly but steadily, a secure and worry-free asset. They live off a home equity loan taken out against the apartment, and with the help of a realtor who’s a distant relative, Mina’s father managed to purchase an apartment in a neighboring city that draws a lot of investors. Three months later they sold it for a thirty-five percent profit. With those proceeds and the remainder of the lottery money they invested in a diversified real-estate fund that proved successful. Six months ago Mina’s father left for Pusan vowing to write a masterpiece.